Contributor(s): Dr Sara Geneletti, Dr Laura Gilbert, Professor Helen Margetts | Routinely collected UK government data sets contain staggering amounts of information. The potential for the use of these data to understand how government policies are changing people’s lives, to aid better decision making and to hold government accountable for the policies they make is enormous.

The process is not however all plain sailing. Good, big, and representative data sets are essential, and datasets are often far from perfect with inherent biases and missing entries. Cleaning data is time consuming and labour intensive and analysis requires skilled data scientists. These issues can be overcome or at least mitigated, and in the future government policies could be based on evidence drawn from these data and tested on model populations prior to implementation.